Professor James Heckman Discusses the Inadequacies of GED Testing Methods

Harris Public Policy Professor James Heckman, a Nobel Laureate who is also the Director of the Center for Social Program Evaluation and a Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Economics and the College, was featured in NPR's Hidden Brain podcast, discussing the deficit of lessons taught in GED programs beyond those directly required by the examination to graduate.

"I realized that the whole educational establishment, at least the establishment that looked at test scores and that valued schools and valued people by these test scores really was just missing important dimensions of human behavior," Heckman said. "And so that brought me onto a subject which is fascinating, and which I think is really important to success and understanding success and failure, and that is the notion of what I call non-cognitive skills."

Full coverage available at Hidden Brain. The podcast was also featured in NPR's Morning Edition.